miles from the volcano.
rot or insects. The salvage and tree-planting
operation had the urgency of battle, as remem
bered by Dick Ford, who was there. He now
directs the company's Forest Learning Center
on State Route 504, created to explain the blast's
effects on the forest to visitors. "We had to act
fast," he said. "We had lost three logging camps
and many miles of roads and railroads." A thou
sand workers converged on the area. Endless
parades of logging trucks carried hundreds of
loads a day to mills in the vicinity, which cut
enough lumber to build 85,000 three-bedroom
homes. Replanting began the following winter,
with care to get seedling roots into soil beneath
the ash. "Some now top 55 feet," Dick said. "We
expect our first cut in 2024."
CI'HE
ERUPTION also disrupted human lives.
Those who lost loved ones wrestled grief
and futility. How could the whole world
change so suddenly? Among those trying
to sort it all out was Donna Parker. On that
momentous May 18 she had stood outside
her home in Canby, Oregon, near Portland,
and watched the blue-black pillar of ash roil
over Mount St. Helens, 70 miles away. The
plume expanded ominously into what had
been a cloudless Sunday morning. "I walked up
the hill for a better view," Donna recalled, "and
I thought, I'm so thankful we don't have any
body up there."
But later came word that her brother Wil
liam P. Parker and his wife, Jeanne, were miss
ing. An air search located the truck and the
couple on an ash-covered spur of Coldwater
Ridge. "It's the picture on pages 32 and 33 of
your January 1981 GEOGRAPHIC," Donna said.
A roll of film from inside the truck miracu
lously printed. "It shows my brother sitting on
the stump in the foreground. It was taken the
day before he died."
Donna soon realized she was not at peace.
She decided to place a white wooden cross
where William and Jeanne had died. Others
had perished in the area, and some were long
time friends, so her list of crosses grew-to 12.
"I tried to visit the crosses on the eruption
anniversary, and I'd leave a flower at each one."
For a while she also organized picnics for
survivors. Some of them joined her visits to
A month before the blast, a plume of steam
hiding a perfectly conical peak hints at the
fire within. Rising magma pushed against the
north flank until it triggered a landslide that
took 1,300 feet off the summit (below). The
subsequent explosion unleashed a searing
cloud of gases, rocks, and ash that flattened
230 square miles of forest. Yet spring snow
protected saplings, seeds, and hibernating
animals and jump-started the process of
regrowth. "If this had happened in August,
everything would have been lunar for much
longer," says David Wood, a plant ecologist
at California State University, Chico.
MOUNT ST. HELENS